A Florida restaurateur who operates roughly 40 Denny’s locations and five Hurricane Grill & Wings franchises in Florida, Virginia and Georgia intends to add a 5 percent surcharge to customers’ bills to offset costs from ObamaCare beginning in January 2014 when the Affordable Care Act is fully implemented.

To further offset the costs, Metz, who oversees roughly 1,200 employees as president and CEO of RREMC Restaurants, LLC, said he also will slash most of the staff's time to fewer than 30 hours per week. That change will be announced to employees next month, he said.

She figures that for her professional engineering consulting business the fully functioning managed employee costs about 2.7 times the base salary. She has a different metric for planning the manufacturing side of her business.

The metric seems to cover all the basics. It will be different for every industry and every state. The article failed to mentioned state unemployment taxes. I doubt that Dennys' employee cost is 2.7 times base salary, I could be wrong.

Consider using independent contractors to cover peak periods if your business does not have too steep a learning curve.